Over the years, I've had too many issues with Unstable breaking when I needed it most (generally something work-related). As a home/hobbyist system, it's probably fine though.

The article's mention of this Tumbleweed distribution is interesting - a stable, non-breaking core, with up-to-date applications. In fact, achieving that sweet spot is why I migrated to OS X some years ago. I'm going to check it out.

In reaction to this article I googled around and found SolusOS. Building on Debian stable, adding convenient non-free stuff (drivers, flash, etc.) and fresh apps (e.g. current Firefox). I'm currently preparing the install disk, so no real experience so far, but the reviews are good.

http://solusos.com/

> I've had too many issues with Unstable breaking

So what you're saying is the distribution called Unstable is somewhat... unstable at times?

Debian testing as been a good mix of "stable" and "new" for me. I was using Squeeze for awhile and it seems like "stable" in the Debian sense can also mean buggy and feature-less. There was a battery eating, CPU melting bug in the Squeeze kernel, and the fix wasn't actually brought over from testing. I'm thinking to myself "how stable is this really if I'm not getting an important fix like that?"

Stable means "doesn't change", not "works fine". If you have a system running smoothly, Stable guarantees you won't get new surprises.

I second this. I switched from Arch to Debian unstable so I could have machines targeting unstable, testing and stable all from the same distro.

I do miss Arch-style init though.

Arch makes it trivially easy to poke at the source code for any particular package, which has immensely helped me learn how things work.

I'm just curious: did that matter very much to you? if so, is there some Debian process to do the same thing?

  apt-get source [package-name]

This downloads the source of the package to the current directory. To compile, first install the compilation dependencies:

  apt-get build-dep [package-name]

Then inside the source directory, the easiest way is to install debuild and then just run:

  debuild

That compiles and creates a .deb ready to install.

The New Maintainers guide[1] has a lot of information, though most is only relevant if you want to become an official Debian maintainer; for tweaking existing packages, it's not important.

[1]: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/index.en.html

I did the exact same thing. Migrated my office (6 PC and 3 servers) from Arch to Debian for the reason you give.

I don't miss Arch since I'm very happy with it at home and on my laptop.